CPI BOOKS RAMPS UP ON DEMAND CAPABILITY

CPI Books has reacted toshift towards print-on-demand by buying six new Canon printers.

The company, the UK’s biggest book printer, has bought five Canon Océ VarioPrint 6320s and one Océ VarioPrint 110 for its 60-staff Eastbourne site.

The machines will replace CPI’s fleet of Canon 6250s and offer a combined production speed of almost 1,700 A4 impressions per minute. The machines will also enable the company print different books and materials during a single print run.

General manager at the company’s STMA division, Martin Collyer, said the company was seeing “a significant shift towards a need for print-on-demand services”.

“We’re seeing a trend among publishers towards shortening the inventory cycle, where first impressions print conventionally and then the title goes straight to print-on-demand.

“Increasingly, titles are designed for print-on-demand first. It’s a shift that we are witnessing among customers of all sizes; from the large trade publishing houses through small and medium-sized publishers to self-publishers,” he said.

Collyer said CPI chose the VarioPrint technology to meet its need to produce books in high volumes in a very short run-times.

“CPI has to be agile to respond to the evolving demands of our customers, which is why we’ve invested. It’s part of an ongoing investment programme across the CPI Group in the UK to support all the markets in which we operate.

“Our reasons for choosing Canon were primarily reliability and efficiency, and that our operators already knew the machines,” he added.